I was embarrassed that we’d created a human being who would act this way

My face grew hot and I covered my neck, sure it was blotching. And that morning, during recess, someone said Violet pulled down their pants and threw handfuls of rocks in their underwear. A girl who said Violet stabbed her thigh with a pencil. She gave us the example of a boy who was scared to sit near her because she sometimes twisted his fingers until he cried. She’s very … astute.”īut there were incidents that had caused her classmates to be uncomfortable with her. “Violet is an exceptionally bright child. The spring after Violet turned four, her preschool teacher asked us for a meeting after school on a Friday. Until, one day, someone else notices Violet’s odd behavior. She learns to keep them to herself nobody wants to hear them, let alone believe them. Why does Violet seem to hate her at an instinctual level? And is there truly a darkness growing behind that tiny face?įor years, Blythe’s fears are ignored and unspoken. Why is this so hard? What is she doing wrong? A chasm begins to grow between mother and daughter, then Blythe and Fox, and all the while, Blythe is filled with shame and guilt. Violet has self-destructive tantrums, refuses to be calm, fights and screams incessantly-but only in front of Blythe. Violet cried only when she was with me it felt like a betrayal.Īs the months pass, the feeling of wrongness only intensifies. The only mother who looked down at her daughter and thought, Please. The only mother who couldn’t pretend to function with her brain in the vise of sleeplessness. The only mother who couldn’t fight through the pain of newborn gums cutting like razor blades on her nipples. I felt like the only mother in the world who wouldn’t survive it. Nobody talked about the feeling of being woken up after forty minutes of sleep, on bloodstained sheets, with the dread of knowing what had to happen next. I’d been warned about breasts like cement boulders. I’d been warned about those hard, early days. From the very beginning, the baby Fox dotes on and everyone swears is perfect and lovely strikes an awful chord in Blythe. But from the day Violet enters the world, everything seems to go wrong. She read the books, attended the classes, joined the mommy groups, and all the while, she promised herself (and her unborn daughter) that she wouldn’t be anything like her own mother.

With Fox and his parents, Blythe finally has the loving, supportive, stable family she’s always longed for and a future that looks nothing but bright.īlythe thought she was ready for motherhood-that she wanted to be a mother. The Push by Ashley Audrain is a debut novel and a tense, page-turning psychological drama about the making and breaking of a family and a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for but everything she feared.Ĭollege sweethearts Blythe and Fox Connor have a charmed life and romance.

The push by audrey audrain